I have to agree with Dao. Shouldn’t Thunderbird use the same way as it is already implemented in Firefox? When users are switching between their favorite applications it’s not healthy to let them adapt on the different behavior each time.

A lot of the missing features are painfully obvious at this stage: Can’t middle click to open in a new tab, can’t move tabs around, it doesn’t appear you can open the composer in a tab, and you can’t close the inbox. I’d also like to see Ctrl+T for a new tab, and maybe a Speed Dial-like menu to open the inbox/other directories, a calendar, tasks view, and composer.
You can also tell that the theme effects are missing, but I guess that will be worked out later (and hopefully at the same time as a full Tango+GTK theme is made?)

Looks like an interesting change, and likely to be very helpful — it gives me an easy hotkey (ctrl+tab) to switch between mail and calendar that I didn’t have before. Where should the toolbars go? In the default view, we have, from top to bottom:

Well, just keep in mind that tabs aren’t very good for e.g. side-by-side comparisons, or if you’re writing a message while consulting another. I can open multiple windows of Firefox if I want to do that, but Thunderbird can only have 1 main window open at a time.

So it is important that it will still be possible to open messages in a new window, and that preferably the other tab-functionality (calendar, search, etc.) can be too.

The Inbox is not closeable by design, otherwise you can end up with an empty window or we have to close down Thunderbird. Either way doesn’t seem idea. We still need to remove the close button from the Inbox though, that would remove much of the current confusion.

Speed Dial-like menu is a good idea, we’re trying to figure out a blank tab page design that includes options like this.

The screenshot is from Windows Vista and the icons need some work. Anyway, thanks for the support!

@Ben: yes, most of the toolbars are going away when lightning finishes integration with Thunderbird. see:

@Laurens: There is a trick to get multiple Thunderbird windows open at the same time. I don’t think we’re going to take that route. Instead I think we’ll be offering options in each tab to open in ( New Window )

The close tab on inbox should only disappear when is the only tab with all folders [folderpane] in the area. That leaves me the choice to have the last tab one of the several accounts/inboxes etc there.

(Today it opens and acc in another tab with the whole folderpane.)

Also, drag a folder/acc in tab area to open it separately should work, like a link in FF. And having several calendar / task tabs could do also, with different views (dif months, month+week etc). But that is maybe not for you ..

[note: rclick show “close tab” an all areas, on the cal icons and even in empty tab area ..]

Excellent, thanks for the quick replies (to all comments, no less). Also worth pointing out as people read these comments (since I certainly hadn’t known of it before) is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=456814 which tracks an awful lot of useful changes being suggested…

Regarding the inbox-not-closeable-by-design, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it makes sense that an email program ought not to close its email view. On the other hand, it’s a tab… For UI reference, Songbird also has a non-closeable tab for the main library, which they distinguish by not having a close button and by coloring it differently from other tabs. Alternatively, if you do design a strong “blank page” design, you could make the mail tab closeable and display that blank-tab page if there’s nothing else to display.

One added benefit of a Ctrl+T page is that you don’t /need/ the buttons on the right, so you can hide the tab bar when only the inbox is showing.
(My most wanted change is still a Tango+GTK icon set, before that it was better GTK integration, which is why I started testing TB3 in the first place)

I have been using firefox for awhile now and like it very much. Still have lots to learn about all you provide. Anyhow sunday my system went down and I lost everything all my files etc.

I contacted HP and they were no help. I need to get rid of a driver that’s incompatible with Windows XP and am not doing it right. I had deleted it long time ago and can’t remember how I did it. I am on the computer every day. I need to pull up a firefox restore point from Saturday October 19th to get my computer working right again. How do I do that.

I don’t think there’s an option to use double-click on a message. Middle click on a message will be available very soon. I would look into creating an add-on for double-clicking such that you could have that functionality right away.

aboot

This is the blog personality of Bryan Clark. I'm a designer in a world of open source. This blog reflects mostly writing about Design, Open Source, Economics, Beer, Wine, and Dogs. There's more information about me on this site or you can contact me directly at clarkbw@gmail.com.